Congratulations, California! It’s July 1, the start of the new fiscal year, and you don’t have a budget, again. And if Mike Villines is to be believed, you won’t have one for some time:
“We’re doing meetings, but we’re not making a ton of progress,” Villines said on the final day of the 2007-08 fiscal year.
The four legislative leaders are meeting regularly, but “a lot of it is building a rapport.”
I hope they’re playing that “trust” game where one of them falls to the ground and relies on everyone else to catch them, that’s always a good one. Maybe they could swing a team building trip to Joshua Tree while they’re at it!
According to Villines, those mean old Democrats are just irrationally sticking to raising taxes at a time of budget deficits between $15 and $20 billion dollars! Don’t they know they could just stop funding public schools and everyone could go home for the summer? (over…)
In part, he blamed Democrats for sticking to a plan to raise taxes – $11 billion in the Senate and $6 billion in the Assembly – for stalling talks. He called such figures “totally unfounded and out of touch with reality.”
“We understand the budget is a compromise. Being in the minority, we understand that,” Villines said. “But we’re having a difficult time getting our counterparts to really change their original premise on the budget, which is, ‘We need taxes. We need to continue spending in government and that’s the budget that we want.'”
“I keep waiting for that to end so we can get to where we are seriously negotiating,” he added. “We haven’t gotten there.”
It’s funny that Villines claims he understands the budget to be a compromise, given that there are literally dozens of members of his caucus who have never voted for a budget in their political careers.
He also said that the Big Four has agreed to flatten out the corrections budget. Funny, of all the things both sides choose to cut is the one program which is in such a crisis that we’re going to have a trial in November that will almost certainly lead to mass releases. The failure of leadership on the prisons continues.
I also like Villines trying to make hay out of “Democrats not naming their tax hikes,” seeing that this was exactly the strategy Republicans tried last year, not naming their budget cuts once before eventually agreeing to a deal. The hypocrisy, it blinds!
We know what the Republicans want to do. They want to constrain spending so that it grows slower than the economy until it becomes so small they can drown it in the bathtub. There’s nothing novel about it, it’s pure Norquistian conservatism, the same kind that we’ve seen fail the country during the Bush Administration. As Dan Walters, believe it or not, said two weeks ago, “California’s voters, first by mandating two-thirds legislative votes on new taxes with Proposition 13 in 1978, and then guaranteeing schools a hefty share of current revenue and any new taxes with Proposition 98 in 1988, may have made it almost impossible to balance revenue and spending.” They were sold a bill of goods by the Yacht Party’s con men, told they could have their low taxes and eat from the fruit of generous public services too. Everyone now understands this is a sham, but snake-oil salesmen like Mike Villines are still trudging out to the fields with the bottles of “Dr. Turlingtons Balsam of Life” trying to sell it to the rubes.
And that, my friends, is why there’s no budget on July 1 again. And this will continue to happen until the Yacht Party is made to pay at the ballot box. Because the current laws make the state ungovernable, only a 2/3 majority that can reform the rules, so that the party in power can rise or fall on the results of the actions it is allowed to deliver, will ever provide what’s necessary for California to function and survive.
